I share the decision of the Catalan health ministry to put an end to indoor mask wearing, except in those very sensitive spaces that we can all easily identify, for two reasons: the first, because whenever I can prefer to align myself with the decisions of my government and, in this case, I consider its view is reasonable and correct; secondly, and in this case more importantly, because I am completely fed up with decisions such as whether or not people in Catalonia should wear masks in enclosed spaces having to be predetermined by the Spanish ministry and a decision adopted at the the meeting of the health authorities of all of Spain's autonomous communities. Is it really necessary for Catalonia to have a voice and a vote about what Madrid, Extremadura or Melilla do on a topic as specific as this one? And, obviously, vice versa: will the Spanish ministry or the communities of Aragon or Murcia have a better idea over what Catalonia should do?
I know that the practice of jumping through hoops has ended up becoming standard, but does it need to go this far? In the end, the margin for autonomy, and in this case for arbitrariness or subjectivity, has become so small that there ends up being very little margin for decision-making and this should not only be a problem for the pro-independence parties, but also for all those defenders of decentralization that support the need to bring the centre of political decision-making closer to those affected. It's called the principle of subsidiarity, a term that has certainly fallen into disuse and is not part of the current Spanish political vocabulary.
This Wednesday we learned, through a new ruling by the High Court of Catalonia (TSJC) that, from now on, university access exam papers must also be handed out in Spanish and that the instructions used for those exams last year in questions referring to the language have been declared null and void. Not even a week goes by without Catalan language policy and protection losing further ground and the most serious thing is that the end is not in sight. The TSJC is not satisfied with papers in Spanish being giving to any student that asks for them, but forces the tests to be distributed in both languages without prioritizing one over the other. Thus, it affirms that with the formula used up till now by the Catalan government, students who wanted to do the exam in Spanish were marked out and this was an attack on their rights.
One might think that the mask issue and the obligatory status of the exam papers in Spanish don't have much in common. But they do. In essence they show that in two different estates, politics and justice, autonomy is being trimmed back. The idea of recentralizing, sometimes through grand swoops and at other times in small but significant steps, is rooted in a uniform Spain that tries to force its will, and has its origin in the barring of the state of autonomous communities imposed in the year 2000 under José María Aznar's absolute majority, with which both the Socialists and the entire Spanish establishment are comfortable. Onward, there's always one more exclusive power to be withdrawn.